Yes it appears Mortal Kombat 1 is officially dead. Nobody knows exactly where it ended. It could be the underwhelming base game, the controversial Kameo system, the overpriced costumes, the absolutely awful single player content, the guest characters nobody asked for, the terrible and inconvenient crossplay format, or just the natural life cycle of NRS games in general but it’s official from the Mortal Kombat Twitter itself, Mortal Kombat 1 has no plans to continue adding any content.
This isn’t news to those that have been paying attention to the leaks and behind the scenes stories from Mortal Kombat 1, as we speculated here last November the Khaos Reigns story DLC underperformed both critically and financially and the second Kombat Pack just wasn’t well received, and it looks like the leaks have been proven true.
As stated, there have been a lot of problems with Mortal Kombat 1 from the word “go”, the problems were apparent with the in-game costume shop being a bit overpriced, and the single player Invasion Mode being probably the worst gameplay experience featured in a Mortal Kombat in quite some time. It really didn’t help that the initial lack of crossplay meant that the online tournament scene, something relatively important to keeping a fighting game relevant over the course of its lifespan, was pretty much dead in the water for the first several months. This isn’t even getting into the fact that many players just dislike the Kameo system the game is built around.
But as I said, Netherrealm games tend to have short lifespans. They are there to make a good amount of initial money and then move on to the next project, this isn’t a multi-year project like some other fighting games and there have been rumors that Injustice 3 is already being worked on. That being said Mortal Kombat 1 released less than 2 years ago and even by NRS standards this is incredibly early. Not a good sign when WB proclaimed that Mortal Kombat is one of the IPs they really want to focus in on in the future, but WB has said a lot of things in the past year that they’ve had to adjust and this will likely be one of them.